Information about large IT suppliers

Tag Archives: Contract Management

MasterCard has finally realized that signatures are obsolete and stupid

Companies are finally seeing the light. Starting in April 2018, MasterCard cardholders will no longer be required to sign their name when they purchase something using their debit or credit cards.

The company has been moving away from requiring signatures for a few years now, with only about 80% of purchases (typically over a certain dollar amount) requiring a signature these days. MasterCard did some digging, though, and per its press release, realized that most of their customers “believe it would be easier to pay and that checkout lines would move faster if they didn’t need to sign when making a purchase.” So they are doing away with signatures entirely, and instead will rely on actually secure measures like “chips, tokenization, biometrics and other newer and more secure methods” instead of scribbly signatures perfected in middle school.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of workers who telecommuted increased 115%, according to a report from Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs. That translates to 3.9 million workers, or almost 3% of the total U.S. workforce, who worked from home at least half the time in 2015.

New technologies have made it easier for people to work remotely.

Branson adds that having as much flexibility as possible where you work can also make all the difference for working parents. “I lived in a houseboat when my kids were young,” he recalls. “I was building Virgin. They were fooling around. I changed a nappy and I’d be on the phone. So I suspect I’ll see more of my kids and family than almost any father.”

Verizon reported a net loss of 18,000 Fios Video customers (versus a gain of 36,000 in the year-earlier period) for the third quarter of 2017. That reflects the “ongoing shift” from traditional linear video to over-the-top services, CFO Matt Ellis said on a call with analysts, as well as competitive offers from rivals. At the end of the quarter, Verizon had 4.6 million Fios Video connections. The telco gained 66,000 Fios Internet subs in the period, to stand at 5.8 million total.

As a hedge against declining pay-TV numbers, Verizon is looking to launch its own OTT television service, similar to Dish Network’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now.

Your best ideas will take more than a few words to lay out, and that’s okay. The most difficult challenges out there–the ones that take real leadership to surmount–are complex. So while there’s an art to speaking about complicated subjects without dumbing them down, your real goal should be to motivate others to engage with complexity, not shy away from it. Tossing out generic remarks that stick to the surface level doesn’t help you do that. Worse, it suggests you aren’t capable of diving any deeper.

Besides providing performance feedback during a large project, the scorecards also are expected to be a way for the state to take into account previous performance in future procurements, something that has been difficult to do in the past because evaluations were based on requirements built into the procurement vehicles. “We had no systemic way of measuring performance and taking it into account,” Ramos said. “We saw that as a gap.”

An AI can detect the presence of risk indicators that you have defined against known risks, it cannot identify risk indicators for unknown risks. If the algorithm doesn’t understand that a tsunami is a risk because it can damage harbours and destroy coastal plants, the risk will not be identified until it discovers a news story about how the supplier plant had to shut down. And if it does not understand that legal proceedings can bankrupt a small company, it could overlook a filing with the potential to bankrupt the supplier. If the supplier was strategic, that is something the organization would want to know about immediately.

Smart contracts are the digital equivalent of the pen-and-paper kind which, even today, are the gatekeepers to major business relationships. Smart contracts work by executing themselves automatically under a given set of conditions, which are pre-programmed into the software that supports them. In the case of DAO, funds will be transferred based on a majority vote, which itself is executed by digital signatures. Slock.it is the company behind DAO’s smart contract infrastructure.

Also:

The issue is one of control. There is potential for smart contracts to put buyer-supplier relationships under significant strain if, for instance, a dispute occurs and adequate consideration has not been given to the process for dealing with this in the digital setting. In computer-to-computer purchasing, for example, with which party does the burden of proof sit? The recent and public SWIFT-Bangladesh Bank saga has already showcased the extent of the tensions caused by disagreements over who’s system is at fault.

Another differentiating characteristic about millennials is that they are not as interested as previous generations in climbing the traditional career ladder, going from a junior buyer to a senior buyer, to a manager and on to procurement director, Peck said. They can be happy with lateral career moves that spark change in their daily routine or challenge them in a new way.

Career training, too, is highly valued among millennials — something Peck pointed out was a huge positive for procurement and supply chain organizations. In her experience, Peck said it can be “like pulling teeth” to encourage other generations of employees to take training courses or continue their education. With millennials, however, this isn’t a problem.

At ROYCE, we’ve been burned in the past because we were so starstruck that a luxury department store actually chose us that it blinded us from the far-reaching implications of that order. No one was asking the important questions — What’s their credit history? What are the logistics chargebacks? What the hell is a “loyalty discount?” (Side note: I will never forget the time that a prestigious UK retailer gave us a significant PO, only to subtly mention in the fine print that there were 21 percent off worth of discounts and co-op advertising costs, after already succumbing to aggressively discounted landed costs!) There’s nothing more anticlimactic than landing a career deal, only to meekly utter “thanks, but no thanks.”

“The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology,” said Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv.

“Five years ago, the role was buried many layers down in the organization, if it existed at all,” she said. “Today, the CISO is a business leader.”

Diedre Diamond, founder and CEO of CyberSN, speaking at the recent SOURCE Boston conference, offered three other reasons: Lack of understanding of the role, lack of advancement potential and unhappiness with leadership or company culture.

One has to remember that stagnant GDP growth, rising inflation, steady or increasing unemployment, rising inequality between the rich and poor and an increasing need for resources in greatly limited supply are creating a perfect economic storm that will sink any company not ready to compete in the global marketplace that has taken hold in most large economies. Value chains are becoming bifurcated and turned on their heads. Consumers want local and they want global on demand. Products need to come from everywhere and go to everywhere, be compliant with local and foreign regulations, be produced in a socially responsible fashion and be sold through the appropriate digital channels. And this all has to be done by Monday morning at 9 am.

If you want to solve this problem of better intelligence through better information, you can’t just outsource it away. There is nothing wrong with setting up a center of excellence (CoE) for supply market intelligence and using it to parse out intelligence requests from stakeholders via category managers to low-cost third parties. But it’s only a temporary fix. You need to get your procurement information management capabilities understood and improved so that you’ll be able to take advantage of the massive and diverse forms of digital assets that are getting built out.

I am just going to leave this one right here…
DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE’D GET APPLE TO MAKE ITS PRODUCTS IN AMERICA

Of course, even if Trump is elected president, it won’t happen. There are a number of reasons why Apple can’t or won’t bring its manufacturing jobs to the US:

Legal reason: For starters, there is no U.S. law that can force an American company to make its products in America, notes Engadget. Any attempt at passing such a law would be vigorously opposed by virtually every U.S. company, Constitutional scholars, and likely, even most Republicans in Congress.

China reason: Then there is China, which is increasingly becoming Apple’s most important sales territory in the world. No tech company wants to annoy China, the country with the largest amount of consumers on the globe. Can you imagine how China would react if Apple said it was moving Chinese manufacturing jobs out of the country? If it wouldn’t ban Apple’s products outright, it would almost certainly levy draconian import taxes on them, making them so expensive for consumers that Apple’s sales in China would nosedive.

Cost reason: Another reason Apple would probably never move all of its manufacturing jobs to the U.S. is because it would increase the cost of its products all over the world. Wages are higher in the U.S. than in other countries where goods are manufactured and those wage hikes would almost certainly be passed on to the consumer in the form of more expensive iPhones and iPads.

Rob Woodstock, Accenture managing director, operations strategy for UK and Ireland, says the same lesson is true for all organisations. And while procurement has been successful in creating savings during sourcing and tendering, better management of contracts represents an untapped opportunity to improve performance.

Additionally:

This fragmented, complex picture of contract management can mean organisations miss opportunities to save money and face increased legal risks, Woodstock says. It also leads to difficulties understanding the pricing schedules across multiple contracts. “Even for those that are available, a large number are out of date,” he says, adding that there is often no visibility as to when contracts come up for renewal.

Strategic Or Tactical: Time To Decide And ActIf you have been reading this blog for the last two years, I have been shouting this. This short post sums up my views on strategic sourcing.

IT could well be an ally too, particularly in efforts to ensure cyber security and take advantage of the analytics possibilities with big data. And engineering could learn to appreciate procurement’s value too. While engineers may think they know the capabilities of some part suppliers, they may not know of the capacity constraints those suppliers have that can prevent them from delivering on time. Procurement should know about those constraints through its studies of the suppliers’ markets and industries.

Right! Except that the Holy Grail of trying to extend a “centralized” database umbrella over completely disparate systems is both incredibly expensive and nearly impossible. Baseline suggests “[partnering] with a reputable systems integrator.” Good for them — at least they dodge this bullet rather than getting the answer completely wrong. The right answer is that business analysts should be able to construct BI datasets on their own, as needed, from whatever data sources are useful/appropriate, and it shouldn’t be difficult for them to do so. Concentrating all of the information under one umbrella isn’t necessary; many umbrellas can do the job, and if they’re easy to deploy, they’re both inexpensive and provide a better and more flexible answer.

A data-innovation map can give you a bird’s-eye view of your customers’ experience and show you how you can be more innovative with data — not to mention save time and drive revenue. Without a data-innovation map, you’re likely missing out on places in your strategy where you could more effectively use data and inadvertently give your competition a leg up.

Shrinking the pie also requires procurement professionals to hone and broaden their skill set. I think that one of the best characteristics for someone in procurement is ‘being nosey’ (or to say this more politely, ‘being curious’). This needs to extend and broaden if you are to shrink the pie. You need to be curious not only about the business need, the supply market and the total cost, but also about the interfaces between the supplier and the customer and the supplier and its suppliers.